Google’s Niantic Labs To Develop James Frey’s ENDGAME Trilogy Into An Augmented Reality Game Series

Google’s game studio Niantic Labs has become quite popular this last year for their work on the globally popular Augmented Reality game Ingress, that fuses together elements of Video Games with the physical world, to bring the public a location based experience unlike any other. Today, Niantic Labs has just announced that they will be partnering up with 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, and the NYT bestselling author James Frey, to bring a completely new game series to Android and iOS by the end of this year. This new game will allow players to band together, much like they do now in Ingress with their chosen faction, and battle it out to unlock the secrets and mysteries of ENDGAME. Besides the new AR game, Niantic will also put out 6 ENDGAME novellas that will be exclusive to the Google Play Store, further engaging readers of the original “to come” ENDGAME novels from James Frey along with the game series.

The entirety of ENDGAME will span more than just a trilogy of novels from Frey and the content from Niantic though. It’s a completely immersive multimedia experience. The ENDGAME trilogy as well as the AR game will be paired together with 15 ebook novellas, a series of YouTube videos, mapping coordinates, search and image results, A Film Series from 20th Century Fox and social media all into one massive interactive media project. The first book in the series, which all of the other content will be based off of and intertwine with, is called ENDGAME: The Calling and will be the first novel of three, and will be published on October 7th of this year. Sometime around the publishing of the novel is when we can more than likely expect the game from Niantic Labs to launch, along with some of the other cross media content.

Perhaps the most interesting fact about ENDGAME, is that each book in the trilogy of Novels contains an interactive puzzle that is made up of clues and riddles you can find throughout the text in the book. Solving these clues and riddles will net what is being classified as a “Major Prize”. For the first novel, the prize will be an unannounced quantity of Gold that will be housed in a bulletproof glass case, which will be on public display somewhere and can be opened with a key that is found by solving the puzzles within the book. The claiming of the prizes are to be broadcast live on YouTube. It all seems very interesting and should be exhilarating experience for gamers as well as those who read the novels. In fact, it just might convince more people to read the novels, in exchange for a chance at winning the prize. Let us know what you think about this new game coming from Niantic Labs in the comments.